Rachel Attias
Pond Scum
Ryan and I have our fingers threaded through the chain link of the barbed wire fence. We’re staring at the pond that Libbie jumped into two-and-a-half minutes ago and hasn’t surfaced from yet. People used to call it The Pond by the Fish Hatchery, back when it was a place to picnic and play chicken while our parents held our little siblings up by the bellies so they could splash around with floaties on their arms. Now the hatchery is shut down and nobody calls the pond anything, except for Walker Gold and Metallurgic Corp, which drained it and lined it with something plasticky and permanent, and re-christened it Tailings Pond 2.
“She’s dead,” Ryan says, and claws at his hair. “Oh my fucking god.”
“She’s not dead!” I grab his arm and pull it down to his side, squeeze his hand tight. Libbie’s not dead. She’s going to surface now, and now, and now.
The water in Tailings Pond 2 is an unnatural, vivid green. It’s cloudy like a cup someone has been using to rinse their brush after painting poison treefrogs. The green has long since closed around the space where I last saw Libbie’s body. The ripples she made have stopped.
We don’t have a plan for this. Here’s how it’s supposed to go: Libbie jumps in the water and comes out a second later, and pretty soon she starts displaying the early symptoms of cyanide poisoning, which are headaches, dizziness, shortness of breath, vomiting, et cetera, and Ryan and I take her to the hospital and we call the local press and they report our protest against Walker Gold, who’ve been pulling rocks and ore out from the hill outside town, processing them with cyanide, and dumping their waste chemicals into the pond we used to swim in, which is probably leaking into our drinking water. National news syndicates will pick up the story because folks pay attention when an American teenager puts her life on the line—all that potential, potentially wasted—and Mark Ruffalo will petition Congress, and they’ll shut down the gold mine, and we’ll all be saved.
It was always going to be Libbie who jumped in. We agreed it had to be a girl for feminism’s sake, and Libbie is blonde in a way that will elicit sympathy even from the staunchest right-wingers. I knew Libbie’s counterargument—"but you’re so pretty, too, Nat!”—was perfunctory, but I still tingled when she said it. Anyway, I’m way too chickenshit to do this. Plus, there’s a part of me that knows the whole design is flawed since nobody actually gives a fuck about American teenagers at all.
At last, Libbie’s head and shoulders pop out into the cool Saturday morning air. Her skin is extra pale, almost glowing next to the green water. She’s gasping for breath. Ryan and I slip through the hole we already cut in the fence and we get in the water despite our revulsion, despite the way our shoes sink into the silty bottom past the ankle with each step, and then past our shins and up to our knees as we get waist-deep, until Libbie is in our arms, and she’s laughing hysterically, and lime green water is streaming off all of us, and weird, oily droplets cling to her throat like pearls.
We get back to land and I wring out Libbie’s hair. I pat her cheeks with my one dry sleeve. I help her back into her jeans, her socks, her sweatshirt, her jacket. I glance at Ryan who, as the boy of the group, doesn’t get this privilege. I tell myself that at least I have this one thing he doesn’t, even as Libbie searches the sky for his face until he’s looming above us both, asking over and over again, “Do you feel the poison? Do you feel it yet?”
Libbie pushes me off and sits up. “I went somewhere,” she says. She looks at the pond. “In there. Through the bottom. Another world.”
“Another… world?” I ask.
“A nether world,” she corrects.
“The poison’s kicking in!” Ryan throws his hands up.
Libbie says she got turned around when she was underwater, like she’d been roiled in waves even though the pond was completely still. She thought for sure she’d drown—“and then we’d really get their attention!”—but she surfaced and sucked in mouthfuls of air, not caring that she was swallowing the green cyanide water, too, because actually it wasn’t green, it was a normal dark blueish brownish color and she felt something against her leg and when she looked down the pond was thick with seaweed and a little fish swam past her ankle, meaning it was thick with life in other words, and when she looked up Ryan and I were on the shore waving her in, and we sat on our towels and ate salt and vinegar chips until our tongues hurt.
“You have to see it,” she says.
Ryan and I look at the water. We look at Libbie. We don’t say it, but I know we’re both thinking that the cyanide is working faster than we expected.
“I’m not poisoned!” Libbie says. “I’m fine. Trust me. Please,” she says, and then grabs onto Ryan’s arm. She looks into his eyes. I get the feeling I get all the time, when Libbie texts me or touches me or looks at me, like a wet wool blanket has been wrapped tightly around my heart and is dragging it down, painfully, to my guts. Ryan thinks for a moment and says, “Fuck it,” and takes off his sweatshirt, because even though he doesn’t love Libbie she’s still a wet girl pressed against him.
He strips down to his boxers and takes tiptoe steps through the mucky shore until he’s at the edge of the water and then he’s in it, and gone, and I feel so sick standing next to Libbie, who’s watching the place where Ryan used to be, that I know I’ll go in if he makes it out alive. When he comes up spluttering, I’m already in my bra and panties and splashing into the cold water myself, and it smells metallic and farty and I blow bubbles out through my nose until there’s no oxygen left in my lungs and then I keep on going, and when I rise to the air there are spots in my eyes and I can’t see anything and have to tread water until they go away.
All I see at first is a gray day, the water around me still green, still farty, and somebody alone on the shore. I swim closer. It’s a middle-aged lady who looks like me, wearing my oversized green hoodie, except it fits her better. She’s staring at the water and her posture is bad and she just kind of looks like one big frown. She gives me a little nod of recognition, and I dive back into the water and swim as fast as I can to the real world.
“It’s a nether world that gives you what you want!” Ryan is shouting to me even as I’m still dog paddling back to land. It gave Libbie a clean pond, and it showed Ryan himself and Katie V. sharing a picnic blanket, on a date. Libbie is sorting and passing us back our clothing so efficiently I can tell she’s trying not to cry. On the way to the hospital Ryan asks, “What did you see, Nat?”
“Same as Libbie,” I say.
No news outlets covered our protest, not even the school newspaper, who said they “couldn’t condone trespassing.” What happened instead was that Ryan told Katie V. the whole story about the nether world at the bottom of Tailings Pond 2. The night she became his girlfriend, they went to the pond together and jumped in. Afterwards she told all her friends. Some of them tried it, and they told their friends, and the rumor spread, and suddenly adults were diving into the pond too. Libbie and I thought for a couple days that this was it—the whole town would get sick, and finally we’d have Congress, and Mark Ruffalo, and everything. Some people did get dizzy and threw up but nobody paid any attention to that, and pretty quickly Walker Gold found out what was going on and put in a new fence, this one with a gate and an employee with a laptop so people could e-sign waivers and use their credit cards to pay for entry and rent towels for an extra three bucks. Ryan and Katie V. actually worked the Gold gate together, for minimum wage, through the end of high school.
In the beginning the lines were longer. Some people would swim to the nether world, swim out, and run straight home. Divorces in our town and the surrounding areas skyrocketed that year, as did the number of affairs—which, Libbie pointed out, really meant that the number of known affairs rose, but probably the same amount had been happening all along. She and I would sit in camp chairs at the top of a hill and watch the circus from afar, passing a pair of binoculars back and forth. I was aware of the infinitesimal drift of the lenses as she pressed them to her eyes, how they lingered not on the pond but on the gate where Ryan and Katie V. laughed and made eyes at each other over customers’ heads. Libbie’s bitterness ran off her in cyanide ripples, and I tried in vain to mop it up.
People quit their jobs.
Three of our teachers walked out of school and were never seen again.
A few bands were started. Some bad art was made.
Mostly, though, people didn’t do anything after they came dripping out of the water. But as they toweled off they had a particular, private look on their faces you’d see flashes of every now and then, forever.
Things leveled off pretty quickly. The line dwindled to a handful of people a day, the ones who kept coming back. They stood around in all kinds of weather and looked stooped and sad, before and after. They looked like the old guys who waited outside for the pub to open at three p.m. Some of them were those guys. The pub actually lost some business to Walker Gold. It was around then that Walker Gold instituted their subscription plan. You paid a flat monthly rate, which let you enter the pond any time and pay by the hour by scanning your member card on the way in and out. If anyone was tempted to swim to the nether world and never come back, Walker Gold assured them that they would be collecting dues on the other side, too.
Libbie got bored of watching, bored of everything. Every time she said the word “bored” I knew she was trying not to cry. I knew she would leave, and she did, like Ryan, like most people, after high school. She doesn’t come home for holidays.
I’m not one of those sad souls on the Walker Gold subscription plan, in case you were wondering. I only jumped into Tailings Pond 2 that one time. Sometimes the memory of the me I saw on that gray day fills me with horror, but more often she comforts me. She understands what I’m still learning, which is that in the end my loving Libbie never had much to do with being loved back. One day soon I’ll stand on the shore and look at the water and my own teenaged head will pop up like a buoy, and all I’ll do is nod. I’ll cross my arms in my green hoodie, and try to recall that feeling, any feeling, which could have compelled me to swim on such a chilly day.
Rachel Attias is a writer, educator, and editor based in Portland, OR. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Porter House Review, X-R-A-Y and more, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University and teaches composition at Portland Community College and creative writing workshops around the Pacific Northwest. She is at work on her first novel.
